Studied by 2 people
Lectures 7-11
Ecology
The interaction of organisms with their physical and biological environments
Finding fossils of marine clams with a fish fossil could tell us
The fish lived in the ocean
Principles of paleoecology
Every organism is adapted to a certain mode of life, every organism is adapted to a certain environment, every organism is restricted in its distribution by the limitations of the environment to which it is adapted
Paleoecology is different from ecology because
paleontologists only have fossils to work with
Uniformitarianism
the principle that processes operating now have operated through geologic time
Fossil beds are composites. This means:
they are time-average, they may include fossils brought in from elsewhere
Habitat
The natural environment in which an organism lives
Limiting factors
Environmental factors that control the growth, abundance and distribution of an organism
Animal
multicellular, heterotrophic organisms that are mobile at some point in their life cycle
What is known for certain about the fossils found by Birger Rasmussen (Ediacaran fossils)?
their age
Ediacaran time is
600-540 mya
The two types of biomineralization are
biologically induced and biologically controlled
Which kind of mineralization is used by clams?
controlled
The oldest known mineralized fossils are
Cloudina and Namaclathus
The first animals to appear in the Cambrian Radiation were
Small shelly fossils
Amino acid characteristics
They form with ingredients already on Earth, they need an energy source to form, they can form spontaneously, they do not like hot temperatures
The oldest evidence of life is a chemical fossil found in
Australia
Chemical formula for photosynthesis
CO2 + H20 + sunlight => CH2O + O2
The earliest body fossils on Earth are
Stromatolites from Australia
Protists first appeared how many years ago?
1.85 billion
Evolutionary processes were jump-started by
sexual reproduction
A paleontologist finds a fossil assemblage containing archaeocyathids, trilobites and brachiopods. What age is it?
Cambrian
The type section of the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary is located in
Newfoundland
Archaeocyathids and stromatoporoids are important components of
lower Cambrian reefs
The first vertebrates were
ostracoderms that appeared in the Cambrian
The cause of the end-Ordovician mass extinction may have been
severe global glaciation
Along with the first terrestrial plants in the Silurian, what else colonized the land?
millipedes and eurypterids
Some of the top marine predators of the Silurian were
jawed fishes
Forest of tall tree ferns, club mosses and horse tails first appeared in the
Devonian
The Carboniferous gets its name from
massive coal deposits from the giant forests of the time
The Carboniferous terrestrial environment was dominated by
amphibians
Reptiles became the dominant terrestrial animals in the
Permian
The evolutionary innovation that allowed animals to become less dependent on water and live more successfully on land was
the amniotic egg
Reefs
Skeletal frameworks rising above the seafloor that provide habitat for many organisms
Until they developed WHAT, plants were restricted in their height
cambium
problems plants had to overcome before moving onto the land
support, transport of water and gases, reproduction
The flowering plants are known as
angiosperms
One of the major reasons for the success of angiosperms is
their more advanced reproductive strategies
Conifers radiated most strongly in the
Triassic
In what time period was the flora (plant community) dominated by giant horsetails, lycopodia, ferns and progymnosperms?
Carboniferous
Glossopteris was important because
it was a major piece of evidence for continental drift
Grasses may have appeared in the Cretaceous of India, but their strong radiation was in the
Miocene
Gymnosperms arose in the Permian along with
cycads and ginkgos
Sauropod dinosaurs ate a diet that included
ferns, ginkgos, conifers
The energy source for the formation of amino acids was probably what?
lightning strikes
The oldest VISIBLE (to the naked eye) BODY fossils are
stromatolites
How old are stromatolites?
3.5 billion years old
What is the time period that we call Early Earth?
4600 to 545 million years ago
What is key to the definition of animals?
movement
Biomineralization was a critical evolutionary development because
It provided protection from predators, it gives animals better odds of being preserved in sediments, it gave animals stronger structures
The main reef-forming organisms in the early Cambrian were
Archaeocyathids
The first vertebrates were jawless fishes, and appeared in the
Cambrian
The first terrestrial vertebrates were
amphibians
Note 
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